MidCOM PEAR 1.4 packaging works

20 January 2006

2 minute read

After a bit of discussion and goading from the PEAR community, we decided to package MidCOM for the package.xml 2.0 format and only support PEAR 1.4 or newer.

This decision meant a bit of extra work for me as I had to rewrite the supporting utilities that handle component packaging. However, now that work is done, and I made my first PEAR-powered MidCOM installation today. The result was a working but a bit limited MidCOM environment, as can be seen from this AIS screenshot:

Nice points

PEAR packaging of MidCOM brings lots of benefits, including:

Components can have other PEAR packages, components, or even PHP extensions as dependencies that PEAR installer will handle

Users can install only the components that they actually need

MgdSchema file installation in components is much easier than it used to be

We can start shipping static files inside the component package and install using Role_Web

Trying it out

Since packaging is not 100% complete yet, you need an existing Midgard 1.7.x and MidCOM installation to try it out. Here are the steps to follow:

Continue reading

Since completing MidCOM’s PEAR 1.4 packaging the main remaining issue of making MidCOM installation user-friendly has been setting up a channel. This is now done, and MidCOM 2.5 can be installed in the following way:

The MidCOM PEAR channel has now been upgraded to the Chiara_PEAR_Server version of PEAR channel serving. The upgrade went mostly painlessly following Greg Beaver’s instructions.

About Midgard

Midgard2 is a content repository library that can be used in both web and desktop applications. It is built as by Midgard Project, an international free software community. I've been an active part of the group since its beginnings in late 90s.

Thanks to GObject Introspection, the Midgard2 content repository can be used from almost any programming language, including PHP, Python, and JavaScript.